An Ingenious New Typeface Inspired by Old Maps, But Made With Algorithms

Jonathan Hoefler—one of the best known typographers out there—has designed a new typeface: Obsidian. The 3-D, ornamental font harks back to the days of copper plate engraving, but it's absolutely a product of computers and algorithms.

"We had the idea of doing a typeface inspired by these kinds of exuberant ornamented things that you see on old maps," Hoefler says. But, “how can you do a typeface that is ornamented and exuberant, that still feels current?”

An ornamental font like this could take over a year to get right. So Hoefler and senior designer Andy Clymer solved for this by creating custom algorithms that could help. Obsidian is created in a virtual environment that can simulate light falling on any 3-D character in the set, thus eliminating the need to draw tens of thousands of shadows, one by one.

These two ampersands show two distinct ways that letters can be illuminated—an option that would have painstaking to produce without Hoefler and Clymer's new digital tools.

All typefaces are created in type design software, where letters and numbers show up as coordinates that can be tweaked in infinitesimal ways.

That challenges becomes multiplied for ornamental types. The more ornate the character, the more plot coordinates exist.

As much as Obsidian was inspired by Victorian-era letters, it's a product of the digital age. It doesn’t have hand-shaded gradients indicating a third dimension; it has carefully placed pixels.

Share

An Ingenious New Typeface Inspired by Old Maps, But Made With Algorithms

Jonathan Hoefler—one of the best known typographers out there—has designed a new typeface: Obsidian. The 3-D, ornamental font harks back to the days of copper plate engraving, but it's absolutely a product of computers and algorithms.

"We had the idea of doing a typeface inspired by these kinds of exuberant ornamented things that you see on old maps," Hoefler says. But, “how can you do a typeface that is ornamented and exuberant, that still feels current?”

An ornamental font like this could take over a year to get right. So Hoefler and senior designer Andy Clymer solved for this by creating custom algorithms that could help. Obsidian is created in a virtual environment that can simulate light falling on any 3-D character in the set, thus eliminating the need to draw tens of thousands of shadows, one by one.

These two ampersands show two distinct ways that letters can be illuminated—an option that would have painstaking to produce without Hoefler and Clymer's new digital tools.

All typefaces are created in type design software, where letters and numbers show up as coordinates that can be tweaked in infinitesimal ways.

That challenges becomes multiplied for ornamental types. The more ornate the character, the more plot coordinates exist.

As much as Obsidian was inspired by Victorian-era letters, it's a product of the digital age. It doesn’t have hand-shaded gradients indicating a third dimension; it has carefully placed pixels.

Fonts may live in our computers, but every outline of every letter, number, and symbol in a typeface is originally crafted by human hand. In the 1800s this happened via a copper plate engraving technique that allowed designers to create extravagant letters by hand, lending a uniqueness to maps and books of the time. These days, typographers use type design software, where letters show up as plotted coordinates that can be painstakingly tweaked in infinitesimal ways—nips and tucks that make, say, Baskerville distinct from Cambria.

“Typeface design doesn’t have rapid prototyping,” says designer Jonathan Hoefler, whose type foundry Hoefler & Co. is behind go-to fonts like Gotham, Gestalt and—yes—Hoefler. But to be sold globally, modern fonts can require more than 600 characters, to cover every language. That means designers hand-tuning individual vectors face a lot of demands. Now imagine creating those 600-and-more characters, but for an ornamental font, where vectors don’t only determine the curves of a “S,” but the three-dimensionality and lighting too.

Hoefler & Co.

Hoefler and senior designer Andy Clymer have figured out a new workaround: using custom algorithms to build typefaces. That’s how they designed Obsidian, the newest typeface from Hoefler & Co. Obsidian is a decorative, three-dimensional font created in a virtual environment that can simulate light falling upon any 3-D character in the set, thus eliminating the need to draw tens of thousands of shadows, one by one. The result is a convincing set of 3-D characters that harks back to the early days of type-making, but without all the flowery curlicues and animals that often accompanied 19th century letters.

These days, decorative typefaces aren’t that versatile. That’s a problem for the designers who might spend a year or more laboring over them. “We always worry in working on historical things that we’re going to wind up with a typeface that’s only usable for ragtime sheet music, or some kind of museum piece,” Hoefler says. “We really wanted Obsidian to be useful to contemporary editorial designs, to web designers, to be colorful and expressive but not heavily rooted in history.” To accomplish that, Hoefler and Clymer first started with one of their other designs, a type called Surveyor. That font already had some commercial success, so it became the spine for building Obsidian.

Once Clymer developed the algorithmic tools needed to quickly create a properly lighted typeface, Obsidian somewhat organically became a modern design. Because a computer decided on its highlights and lowlights, Obsidian doesn’t have hand-made gradients indicating a third dimension; it has carefully placed pixels. “This is sort of computationally driven, it really has that kind of texture and dimensionality,” Hoefler says. “For us it’s a whole new way of thinking about letters as a generative process.”

Hoefler and Clymer spent a year creating Obsidian. Hoefler describes the type foundry as being in the “raw materials” end of the business, meaning that it’s up to marketers and designers to get Obsidian out into the wild. He and Clymer will likely train their attentions on creating other unique fonts with similarly smart tools. That’s the next challenge: “How can we apply this set of tools we built without getting the same end result?”